Dynatrace vs. New Relic

Compare Dynatrace vs. New Relic for Observability. We want you to choose the most suitable tool for your use case, even if it’s not us.

As cloud-native environments continue to grow in complexity, observability has become essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of modern applications. From monitoring infrastructure health, enabling deep visibility into distributed systems, or getting real-time insights into reasoning paths, token usage of LLM Agentic applications. However, traditional vendors sliced visibility into separate products (APM, Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, LLM Observability) and priced them in ways that forced tradeoffs making it important for team to choosing the right observability platform is critical to operational success.

Dynatrace and New Relic each bring unique strengths to observability, with distinct capabilities and trade-offs. The best fit depends on your organization’s priorities—whether that’s cost efficiency, deployment flexibility, developer experience, or ecosystem integrations.

The right choice depends on your priorities: cost, control, scale, and flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll compare both platforms to help you determine which best fits your needs, even if the answer isn’t us.

Dynatrace vs. New Relic at a glance

Dynatrace
New Relic
BYOC (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
On Prem (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
Correlation between logs, metrics, traces
Kubernetes native
Limited
Full HTTP Payloads of Request as well as response including headers
Smart Sampling

Dynatrace vs. New Relic at a glance

Dynatrace
New Relic
RBAC for user roles
RBAC for Pages
RBAC for Actions
Fine-grain access control to data/resources (namespace setup support) to provide access to specific teams or by data type (MELT)
In preview

Dynatrace vs. New Relic at a glance

Dynatrace
New Relic
All data types included in standard plan
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
No Ingestion based pricing
Additional costs based on retention
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Additional costs for indexed data
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Out of the box LLM Observability (tokens, hallucinations, drift)
(Requires the installation of an additional agent; token count only)
No Additional Cost
(Manual instrumentation is possible and charges will apply)
RUM
No Additional Cost
(Usage based)
(Additional charges are incurred by events + sessions)

Dynatrace overview

Dynatrace is a software-intelligence platform that provides observability, automation, and security for cloud environments. It offers application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring (DEM), log management, application security, and AIOps in a single system. Dynatrace uses a single agent, called OneAgent, to automatically instrument applications, services, and infrastructure. Its Smartscape technology maps dependencies across environments, while the Davis AI engine analyzes telemetry to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and trigger automated responses. The platform also includes Grail, a data lakehouse designed for storing and analyzing observability and security data with contextual insights. Organizations use Dynatrace to monitor complex IT environments, reduce time to resolution, and automate operational tasks across the software delivery lifecycle.

New Relic overview

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that collects and analyzes telemetry data — including metrics, events, logs, and traces — across applications and infrastructure. It provides a full-stack view of digital systems with capabilities such as application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and customizable dashboards. The platform uses a single data model to unify telemetry, helping teams identify performance bottlenecks, trace dependencies, and resolve issues faster. New Relic also incorporates AI-driven insights for anomaly detection and predictive analysis, and supports real-time alerts to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). Its usage-based pricing model allows organizations to pay for the data they ingest, rather than committing to fixed tiers. New Relic is used by engineering teams to monitor application health, troubleshoot issues, and align observability data with business and operational outcomes.

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